HRM Assignment 8: SONA
{ Posted on 1:54 PM
by Ariel Serenado
}
For this assignment we tasked to identify at least three sections related to Human Resource being discussed by PGMA in her SONA last July this year. As we all know the Human Resource is mainly referring to the people that encompass a certain organization or simply the PEOPLE, therefore the sections that i will be mentioning are things that are of related to the development of the people in this fast changing environment. Perhaps, as I review over the full text of the SONA I have come to identify the following sections discussed by PGMA in her SONA:
Basically, this microfinance is engaged for the poor descendants of the country.
1. What is Microfinance?
2. . Why there is a need for financial services by way of microfinance?
"Comprehensive impact studies have demonstrated that:
• Microfinance helps very poor households meet basic needs and protect against risks;
• The use of financial services by low-income households is associated with improvements in household economic welfare and enterprise stability or growth;
• By supporting women's economic participation, microfinance helps to empower women, thus promoting gender-equity and improving household well-being;
• For almost all significant impacts, the magnitude of impact is positively related to the length of time that clients have been in the programme." (UNCDF Microfinance)
3. Is microfinance the solution to poverty?
Some points also were tackled by PGMA, it may not said verbally but it can be understood, these are the following:
Depending on your requirements, our consultants can help you document cross-enterprise actions and appropriate responses to create a true resilience plan:
• Action steps to recover files before their loss causes a disaster
• Emergency and incident identification and escalation definitions
• Crisis response plans to mitigate human loss and mitigates impact
• Departmental plans that address localized systems and processes
• Data Center and facilities plans, including those for multivendor technologies and networks
• Workplace plans for your staff situated at local, remote or homework locations
• Corporate plans for HR, payroll and many cross-business unit applications
• Call center plans for both internal resources and third-party agencies that use your customer sales and support systems and databases
Resilience Plans and Procedures Development occurs in four primary areas:
• Crisis Management Plan Development - defines the preparatory actions taken prior to and immediately following an emergency to mitigate damage and loss of life and property
• IT Plan Development - defines the IT actions to adapt and respond following a declaration of disaster using recovery strategies and prioritization that supports the recovery requirements of the business
• Business Unit Plan Development - defines actions to support critical business units and their processes, goals and objectives following a declaration of disaster
• Technical Procedures Development - defines the procedures to recover the IT equipment, data and network that support critical business processes
• Business Procedures Development - defines the procedures to recover business processes in the event of
a disaster
IBM’s Business Resilience and Continuity consultants will:
• Predefine the conditions that may cause your plan to go into effect
• Create definitions that accurately portray your organization’s
disaster definition
• Identify decision-makers and their roles before, during and after
an incident
• Inventory the resources required to bring your business units and IT systems back online
• Identify backup technique, frequency and location for data retrieval
• Prioritize and sequence the restoration actions defined in your recovery plan into a detailed timeline and checklist
• Predefine an operations center
to coordinate status, issues
and assignments
• Develop communication strategies for keeping your employees and customers informed
• Organize your recovery plan into a flexible, easily maintained format
• Identify steps and precautions to maintain the same level of security that you have on a daily basis
• Validate your recovery plan using diverse recovery exercise approaches, such as conducting simulations based on real-life disaster declarations
Solution: Preventive, high-quality care for better health.
By ensuring that health plans cover free preventive services for everyone, investing in prevention and wellness, and promoting primary care, health insurance reform will work to create a system that prevents illness and disease instead of just treating it when it’s too late and costs more.
Health insurance reform legislation will establish medically driven priorities and standards on quality, require quality reporting by hospitals, and provide incentive payments for high-quality performance. As a result, older women will have better information to support their health care choices and will receive higher quality care.
Solution: Making high-quality, affordable long-term care a reality.
Sources:
http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/seniorwomen/index.html
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/bcrs/pdf/ss_resilience-plans-and-procedures-development.pdf
http://www.kiva.org/about/microfinance/
Microfinance
Basically, this microfinance is engaged for the poor descendants of the country.
1. What is Microfinance?
"Microfinance is the supply of loans, savings, and other basic financial services to the poor." (CGAP) In pursuant of this matter there microfinance institutions who are greatly involved in this financing. A microfinance institution (MFI) is an organization that provides microfinance services, ranging from small non-profit organizations to large commercial banks.
"Historical context can help explain how specialized MFIs developed over the last few decades. Between the 1950s and 1970s, governments and donors focused on providing subsidized agricultural credit to small and marginal farmers, in hopes of raising productivity and incomes. During the 1980s, microenterprise credit concentrated on providing loans to poor women to invest in tiny businesses, enabling them to accumulate assets and raise household income and welfare. These experiments resulted in the emergence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that provided financial services for the poor. In the 1990s, many of these institutions transformed themselves into formal financial institutions in order to access and on-lend client savings, thus enhancing their outreach.
2. . Why there is a need for financial services by way of microfinance?
"Comprehensive impact studies have demonstrated that:
• Microfinance helps very poor households meet basic needs and protect against risks;
• The use of financial services by low-income households is associated with improvements in household economic welfare and enterprise stability or growth;
• By supporting women's economic participation, microfinance helps to empower women, thus promoting gender-equity and improving household well-being;
• For almost all significant impacts, the magnitude of impact is positively related to the length of time that clients have been in the programme." (UNCDF Microfinance)
"Poor people, with access to savings, credit, insurance, and other financial services, are more resilient and better able to cope with the everyday crises they face. Even the most rigorous econometric studies have proven that microfinance can smooth consumption levels and significantly reduce the need to sell assets to meet basic needs. With access to micro insurance, poor people can cope with sudden increased expenses associated with death, serious illness, and loss of assets.
Access to credit allows poor people to take advantage of economic opportunities. While increased earnings are by no means automatic, clients have overwhelmingly demonstrated that reliable sources of credit provide a fundamental basis for planning and expanding business activities. Many studies show that clients who join and stay in programs have better economic conditions than non-clients, suggesting that programs contribute to these improvements. A few studies have also shown that over a long period of time many clients do actually graduate out of poverty.
By reducing vulnerability and increasing earnings and savings, financial services allow poor households to make the transformation from "every-day survival" to "planning for the future." Households are able to send more children to school for longer periods and to make greater investments in their children's education. Increased earnings from financial services lead to better nutrition and better living conditions, which translates into a lower incidence of illness. Increased earnings also mean that clients may seek out and pay for health care services when needed, rather than go without or wait until their health seriously deteriorates." (CGAP) "Empirical evidence shows that, among the poor, those participating in microfinance programs who had access to financial services were able to improve their well-being—both at the individual and household level—much more than those who did not have access to financial services.
Access to credit allows poor people to take advantage of economic opportunities. While increased earnings are by no means automatic, clients have overwhelmingly demonstrated that reliable sources of credit provide a fundamental basis for planning and expanding business activities. Many studies show that clients who join and stay in programs have better economic conditions than non-clients, suggesting that programs contribute to these improvements. A few studies have also shown that over a long period of time many clients do actually graduate out of poverty.
By reducing vulnerability and increasing earnings and savings, financial services allow poor households to make the transformation from "every-day survival" to "planning for the future." Households are able to send more children to school for longer periods and to make greater investments in their children's education. Increased earnings from financial services lead to better nutrition and better living conditions, which translates into a lower incidence of illness. Increased earnings also mean that clients may seek out and pay for health care services when needed, rather than go without or wait until their health seriously deteriorates." (CGAP) "Empirical evidence shows that, among the poor, those participating in microfinance programs who had access to financial services were able to improve their well-being—both at the individual and household level—much more than those who did not have access to financial services.
3. Is microfinance the solution to poverty?
My own view is that we have to approach extreme poverty a little like the way in which a doctor might approach a patient. Sometimes its terrible governance and the question is how to improve the governance and the hope for the kind of change that is needed. In other places it's the terrible burden of disease that may be addressable by good public health measures. In other places it is to show how to grow more food. In other places its how to get business going and microfinance has proven to be an incredibly powerful tool.
Once the basics are in place, the people are eating and can survive, then microfinance can play a huge role in helping a poor community find ways through the market to get new opportunities, to earn new income, to start saving, making investments and start the process of climbing the ladder of economic development in your children, in your business or your farm and continuing up the process of improving skills, specialization, new business ventures and so on. We've learnt that microfinance can be a wonderful tool for that." - Jeffrey Sachs, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Director
"In the last two decades, substantial progress has been made in developing techniques to deliver financial services to the poor on a sustainable basis. Most donor interventions have concentrated on one of these services, microcredit. For microcredit to be appropriate however, the clients must have the capacity to repay the loan under the terms by which it is provided. Otherwise, clients may not be able to benefit from credit and risk being pushed into debt problems. This sounds obvious, but microcredit is viewed by some as "one size fits all." Instead, microcredit should be carefully evaluated against the alternatives when choosing the most appropriate intervention tool for a specific situation.
Microcredit may be inappropriate where conditions pose severe challenges to standard microcredit methodologies. Populations that are geographically dispersed or nomadic may not be suitable microfinance candidates. Microfinance may not be appropriate for populations with a high incidence of debilitating illnesses (e.g., HIV/AIDS). Dependence on a single economic activity or single agricultural crop, or reliance on barter rather than cash transactions may pose problems. The presence of hyperinflation or absence of law and order may stress the ability of microfinance to operate. Microcredit is also much more difficult when laws and regulations create significant barriers to the sustainability of microfinance providers (for example, by mandating interest-rate caps).
Some points also were tackled by PGMA, it may not said verbally but it can be understood, these are the following:
? Grants can be used to help overcome the social isolation, lack of productive skills, and low self-confidence of the extreme poor, and to prepare them for eventual use of microcredit. Small grants and other financial entitlements can work well as first steps to "graduate" the poor from vulnerability to economic self-sufficiency.
? Investments in infrastructure, such as roads, communications, and education, provide a foundation for economic activities. Community-level investments in commercial or productive infrastructure (such as market centers or small-scale irrigation schemes) also facilitate business activity.
? Employment programs prepare the poor for self-employment. Food-for-work programs and public works projects fit this model. In many cases, these programs may be out of reach for cash-strapped local governments but within the purview of donors.
? Non-financial services range from literacy classes and community development to market-based business-development services. While non-financial services should be provided by separate institutional providers, there are clear, complementary links with the demand for and impact of microcredit.
? Legal and institutional reforms can create incentives for microfinance by improving the operating environment for both microfinance providers and their clients. For example, streamlining microenterprise registration, abolishing caps on interest rates, loosening regulations governing non-mortgage collateral, strengthening the judicial system, and reducing the cost and time of property and asset registration can foster a supportive climate for microfinance."
Resiliency plan
Depending on your requirements, our consultants can help you document cross-enterprise actions and appropriate responses to create a true resilience plan:
• Action steps to recover files before their loss causes a disaster
• Emergency and incident identification and escalation definitions
• Crisis response plans to mitigate human loss and mitigates impact
• Departmental plans that address localized systems and processes
• Data Center and facilities plans, including those for multivendor technologies and networks
• Workplace plans for your staff situated at local, remote or homework locations
• Corporate plans for HR, payroll and many cross-business unit applications
• Call center plans for both internal resources and third-party agencies that use your customer sales and support systems and databases
Resilience Plans and Procedures Development occurs in four primary areas:
• Crisis Management Plan Development - defines the preparatory actions taken prior to and immediately following an emergency to mitigate damage and loss of life and property
• IT Plan Development - defines the IT actions to adapt and respond following a declaration of disaster using recovery strategies and prioritization that supports the recovery requirements of the business
• Business Unit Plan Development - defines actions to support critical business units and their processes, goals and objectives following a declaration of disaster
• Technical Procedures Development - defines the procedures to recover the IT equipment, data and network that support critical business processes
• Business Procedures Development - defines the procedures to recover business processes in the event of
a disaster
IBM’s Business Resilience and Continuity consultants will:
• Predefine the conditions that may cause your plan to go into effect
• Create definitions that accurately portray your organization’s
disaster definition
• Identify decision-makers and their roles before, during and after
an incident
• Inventory the resources required to bring your business units and IT systems back online
• Identify backup technique, frequency and location for data retrieval
• Prioritize and sequence the restoration actions defined in your recovery plan into a detailed timeline and checklist
• Predefine an operations center
to coordinate status, issues
and assignments
• Develop communication strategies for keeping your employees and customers informed
• Organize your recovery plan into a flexible, easily maintained format
• Identify steps and precautions to maintain the same level of security that you have on a daily basis
• Validate your recovery plan using diverse recovery exercise approaches, such as conducting simulations based on real-life disaster declarations
Health insurance
Solution: Preventive, high-quality care for better health.
By ensuring that health plans cover free preventive services for everyone, investing in prevention and wellness, and promoting primary care, health insurance reform will work to create a system that prevents illness and disease instead of just treating it when it’s too late and costs more.
Health insurance reform legislation will establish medically driven priorities and standards on quality, require quality reporting by hospitals, and provide incentive payments for high-quality performance. As a result, older women will have better information to support their health care choices and will receive higher quality care.
Solution: Making high-quality, affordable long-term care a reality.
Health insurance reform will create a new voluntary long-term care insurance program to help cover the costs of support services for the millions who need them. Legislation will also establish new reporting, accountability, and oversight requirements for nursing homes, and impose stiffer penalties on nursing homes with serious quality deficiencies.
Health insurance reform will develop national priorities on quality, standardize quality measurement and reporting, invest in patient safety, and reward providers for high-quality care, especially related to patients discharged from a hospital. Investments in comparative effectiveness research will empower seniors and their doctors with information on which treatments work and which don’t, so that they can make more informed decisions. Health insurance reform will also invest in advanced primary care services that will better coordinate and integrate care for our nation’s seniors, to ensure that they get recommended treatments, particularly for chronic diseases.
Health insurance reform will develop national priorities on quality, standardize quality measurement and reporting, invest in patient safety, and reward providers for high-quality care, especially related to patients discharged from a hospital. Investments in comparative effectiveness research will empower seniors and their doctors with information on which treatments work and which don’t, so that they can make more informed decisions. Health insurance reform will also invest in advanced primary care services that will better coordinate and integrate care for our nation’s seniors, to ensure that they get recommended treatments, particularly for chronic diseases.
Sources:
http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/seniorwomen/index.html
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/bcrs/pdf/ss_resilience-plans-and-procedures-development.pdf
http://www.kiva.org/about/microfinance/
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